Kate Downing Khaled | Founder & CEO
Cesarean sections are on the rise.
New research from the World Health Organization (WHO) found that C-sections, which can be life-saving for people with prolonged or obstructed labor, now account for 1 in 5 births across the globe!
And those parents and children have Ugandan surgeons and Tanzanian and Congolese midwives to thank. While there are current disparities in how C-sections are prescribed today, it’s important to recognize the origins of where this medical advancement came from.
During the mid-1800s, when nearly half of European and US women died in childbirth, and when nearly 100% of European women died if a C-section was performed, healers and midwives in the continent of Africa had perfected a strategy for safe and sterile C-Sections.
The history of C-sections is powerful because it illuminates how the communities who are most ignored by systems built to uphold whiteness and favor men — such as our “modern” medical system — have always been innovators. This is in spite of and because of systemic barriers.
Giving credit where credit is due isn’t just a moral obligation. It’s a deliberate strategy to unearth and revive solutions that patriarchy and racism have distracted us from recognizing.
Here at Imagine Deliver, we tap into pre-capitalist roots and solutions of our systems in a few different ways.
When we’re seeking feedback from community members, we specifically ask questions about their cultural and familial traditions within the system that we’re seeking to transform. We don’t just ask people about their dreams for the future – we want to know how problems have been solved in the past, too.
As part of this work, we prioritize community insights that are shared by elders. Elders hold the majority of life experience, stories, and history within their communities, and they deserve more credit and recognition for the innovation and survival strategies that their life represents.
We also do our own digging into our clients’ knowledge base to identify the original intent of their system and institution.
For example, a recent project with a regional library system led us to discover that libraries have long been sites of radical access and community resistance.
In 1790, Benjamin Franklin donated a collection of books to a Massachusetts town that had named itself “Franklin” in his honor. Residents of the town voted for those donated books to be freely available for town members – creating the nation’s very first public library.
And in more recent history, the American Library Association launched “Banned Books Week” in the early 1980s to push back on the rising culture of censorship that accompanied Ronald Reagn’s presidency and politics.
Understanding this history helped us better interpret the community insights we gather from library users.
Community members reported over and over again that they dreamed of libraries that could be used as safe spaces to organize their communities and advance movements for justice and equity.
The revival of this sentiment feels almost like a historical renewal in today’s world, where justice and belonging is so hard to come by.
Because my team was able to recognize ancestral roots in this present-day community feedback, we could confidently prioritize and raise up this insight in our final strategy recommendations.
Understanding the ancestral roots of today’s medical, government, and philanthropy systems points the way for the types of users and community experts that need to be at the system design table. And it helps us discern actionable solutions that have already been proven successful.
Do you know the original intent of your system and institution? How did your community solve problems before your institution existed? I’d love to understand how your organization accounts for its history in your present-day planning. Contact us today!
